Any weekend you spend out in a remote cornfield in the pouring rain with a baker’s dozen of crazy people can’t be all bad. In this case, it was all good, and the harbinger of that outcome included Friday the 13th as our prep day, 13 people on the crew, and 13 takes of our hardest setup, the running Glidecam V20 through the muddy cornfield in the pouring rain. Ectoplasm and a talismanic lamp were involved. Watermelon rights activists will be outraged.
Answers to pre-production anxiety questions posted in last week’s column:
Will Joe from L.A. make it in time? [Yes, he did, and he was kick-ass in his role as a bulldozer operator possessed by evil entity] Will the Glidecam work? [Yes, it worked great, even in the mud and rain, thanks to Joe Davidson and Daniel Tayag of Nice Guy Productions (notthatnice.com) Whose car will break down? [Jennifer’s rear wheel fell off] Will it be 100 degrees out, or pouring down rain? [poured down rain] Can we block the wireless frequencies from opening garage doors in the neighboring subdivision? [no frequency problem, but some weird toggle switch behavior attributed to evil spirits] Will the lights explode the breakers in the Ghost House? [The breakers held!] Will people hate me? [The shoot was so awesome that no one hated me, at least not to my face…]
Our cast included the aforementioned Joe Basile out of L.A., plus Gulnara Surat and Sophia Medley, two fine and excellent actors from D.C. by way of Russia and Indiana. Sophia has the darker hair, Gulnara the lighter, and Basile, well…
The crew included Jennifer Nordmark, Ashley Lahoda, Rebecca Cammarata, and Paul Waterman from Loyola University. Greg and Lily of Baltimore Precision Instruments (baltimoreprecisioninstruments.com) performed on both sides of the camera. Sound man: Hayden Inskeep. The mysterious Rachel Younghans appeared in both dead and living modes, and crewed, too. She gave us a big hand.
The answer to last week’s most crucial question, “Will we miss the magic?” is definitely clear. We did not. This coming weekend: shoot pick-ups and inserts. And then we enter a region even stranger than the enchanted cornfield of death. It’s called post-production.
— david warfield
